Not Everything is a Life Lesson

“Life isn’t fair.”

“Being a kid is easy. Wait until you have to deal with adult things.”

I would imagine if you walked into any household across America, you’d hear parents uttering one or both of the above statements to the frustrated groans of their children. There’s a reason why sayings like this have lasted the test of time… they’re true. Life isn’t fair, and if I could go back to being a kid and leave behind adulthood responsibility for just one day, I’d do it. The naps alone would be worth it.

I love these sayings. As a matter of fact, I use them so often, they should probably just be scrolling across my forehead in flashing neon lights reminding my kids how full of wisdom I am. I mean, that’s my job as a mother, right? Take all of the experience I’ve accumulated over my 40 years and share it with my kids, so they can understand the secrets of life. Learn from my mistakes. Be better. It wasn’t until one day as I was driving my 14-year-old daughter home from school while she launched into a rant about her day that I realized this was a problem. Before she could even get her frustrations out of her mouth, I was ready to pounce with my bounty of life lessons and supreme wisdom. Instead of listening to me, she shut down, and she shut down hard.

Imagine if every time you came home from work and just needed a few minutes to complain about the pains of your day, the person you were asking to simply be a sounding board jumped in to tell you that your problems weren’t important. Maybe I wasn’t saying those words exactly, but by saying things like, “Just wait until you have adult problems,” or, “Life isn’t fair, so get used to it,” I might as well have been telling her to stop complaining about such petty things.

After that day, I started to really think about the interactions with my kids who were actually choosing to share their stories with me, which isn’t always the case at their ages. I realized that if I wasn’t responding with one of my favorite catchphrases, I was telling them about a time when I was young that was so much worse than what they were dealing with. I was effectively story-topping my own kids!

Before you think I’m the worst kind of mother, know that I was doing all of this out of love. I was so focused on making sure I used every moment I had as a teaching moment, I wasn’t considering whether or not it should be.

The world today provides me with my fair share of moments to speak things into the life of my children that I want them to take into adulthood. They are at an age where the topics of conversation during dinner can range from the latest in shoe fashion to why racism exists, so you might imagine that when they feel like complaining about a coach making them run an extra lap, a simple, “That sucks,” is probably sufficient.

I say all of the time that I am a work in progress when it comes to motherhood, and some days I feel like I’ll be learning how to parent until the day my kids walk out the door. In this case, I’m learning that if every interaction and every conversation involves a lesson, those lessons lose their luster. Going forward, I vow to listen more and teach a little less. And when the moment calls for such a wise response, I’m going to pause, and in the best non-mom voice I can  muster up, I’ll just say, “That really sucks.”

Christie Pettus
Christie Pettus is a full time working wife and mother living her suburban cul de sac dream in Orange Park, Fl. She is Mom to two awesome teenagers, McKenzie and Ethan, who have come to accept that certain parts of their lives will be blogged about, so they should act accordingly. As graduates of the University of Florida, she and her husband Ryan can be found rooting on their alma mater every chance they get including the more obscure sports. LaCrosse anyone? When she’s not judging her kids' questionable teenage choices, she can be found hiding in a room buried in a good book or writing, editing, and dreaming about being a full-time author.

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